MTC services in the field of life applications and communications are becoming more and more popular, and the market is unceasingly increasing. Many machine type communication user equipment (MTC UE) are low cost terminals, and are oriented to low data rate applications. Therefore, currently, MTC UEs can operate well in a Global System for Mobile communications (GSM) or General Packet Radio Service (GPRS) technology network.
Because there are more and more MTC services, it is possible that the number of MTC UEs reaches ten times that of normal user equipment (UE) in the next few years, and therefore MTC relies more and more on the GSM/GPRS network. Meanwhile, with the development of Long Term Evolution (LTE), operators hope to reduce Radio Access Technologies (RAT), so as to reduce maintenance costs of the entire network and improve efficiency and value of the spectrum. In view of the above, a necessary condition for an MTC user to be willing to migrate from a GSM/GPRS network to an LTE network is to provide a low cost MTC UE based on the LTE network.
It is known that decreasing a baseband bandwidth that the MTC UE can support is an effective method for decreasing the cost of the MTC UE. In addition, the number of users (that is, capacity) that can be supported by the LTE network is directly limited by a system bandwidth, and is mainly limited by a bandwidth used by a control channel (for example, an enhanced physical downlink control channel).
Therefore, how to further decrease the baseband cost of the MTC UE under the premise of ensuring that the capacity of the MTC UE is not limited becomes an issue to be settled urgently.